Crestwood firm fined for chemical dumping

Owner sentenced after admitting to 16 years of discharges

February 05, 2009|By Steve Schmadeke, Tribune reporter

The owner of a cleaning-products maker in south suburban Crestwood who admitted discharging acidic and caustic wastewater into sewers for 16 years avoided jail time Wednesday, nine years after soapy bubbles foaming from a Cicero Avenue sewer first drew regulators' attention.

James Spain, 70, of Lemont was sentenced to 1 year of home confinement and fined $30,000 by U.S. District Judge Joan Gottschall. He pleaded guilty in April to criminal conspiracy for violating the Clean Water Act.

His family's company, Crown Chemicals, was fined $100,000 and ordered to issue a public apology. Castillo Uy, a general manager at the firm, is scheduled to be sentenced Thursday after pleading guilty earlier this year to criminal conspiracy.

After Crestwood firefighters were called to investigate the bubbles emerging from the sewer in November 2000, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency obtained a court order to place monitoring equipment in the sewer lines running from Crown Chemical. Spikes showing acidic and caustic discharges exceeding legal limits were recorded over two weeks.

Prosecutors alleged that Spain lied to investigators and for years brushed aside concerns from his workers that what they were doing was illegal.

Employees testified before a grand jury that they were trained to rinse cleaning product residue -- from manufacturing vats as large as 550 gallons -- down the drain. One worker testified that Spain said, "[expletive] the EPA," when the employee raised concerns, said Assistant U.S. Atty. Timothy Chapman.

"He [Spain] had a net worth of $3 million dollars ... yet he did this to save a few thousand dollars a year," Chapman said in court.

As Chapman lambasted him, Spain looked down and wiped his eyes at one point. He and his son, Michael, who Rogers said now runs the company, both apologized.

"I know I made a lot of mistakes in this case," said the elder Spain.

His attorneys pointed out that the wastewater discharges were not large enough to cause any environmental damage and were diluted before reaching the Little Calumet River. One of his attorneys, James Harrington, said that such an environmental case would typically be handled in civil or administrative court.

"What makes this case a criminal case is this guy did this for 16 years -- he saved money, he lied to agents and he got his own people to lie," said Randall Ashe, special agent in charge of the EPA's Midwest region, in a later phone interview.

Gottschall said she took Spain's health -- he has prostate cancer and a heart condition -- into account in sentencing him to probation. But she said she hoped the government would prosecute more environmental cases criminally.